48 comments on “Fuck inside a contract and get a tax break”

Not saying a grand a year will make the slightest difference to couples who are responsible & honest enough to raise a sprog together. Not being married could gain them 30K+ a year ( pre-tax equivalent) though. Honesty’s for fools. Always was.

Will happily accept an extra £200 a year to spend. Its not a reason to get married or stay married but as marriages do happen may as well get something extra out of it.
Used to have a tax allowance years ago, scrapped in the 90s I think.

Surely it’s not £200 a year to spend. In the long run it has to come from taxes. So it’s taking, at a guess, £30 from each taxpayer, and then giving £200 to each eligible couple. So if both are taxpayers they’d be up by about £140. Single taxpayers are down by £30.
How you fix a cost of living problem by transferring money from one group to another overlapping group beats me.

Don’t you idiots read the news? If you don’t have young children then perhaps it’s all passed you by, but married women who don’t work have felt screwed over by the Tories recent childcare policies, and have wondered why they should still vote for the one party they had previously thought should support them. So this is a blatant attempt to win them back.

In other words, just cynical (and probably not very effective) vote-buying.

It is cynical vote buying, but TW is wrong in the way he describes it. It is not money for f**king inside or outside one particular type of contract – and no one is suggesting money for prostitution which is f**king inside a contract. Nor is anyone suggesting sexless marriages, ie most of them, will not be elligible.

It is money for being a responsible parent and getting married before having children. Given that the children of two heterosexual married biological parents are invariably better off in every possible way we can measure, it is not such a bad idea. If it encourages some parents to marry it may well save us money later through reduce prison bills, costs of truant officers, vandalism, mental illness and so on.

The government recognises the disaster area that the feckless underclass has become. But they can’t think of anything to do about it. This is pointless, but it shows that they have some idea of the problem even if they do not have a solution.

Children deserve two married heterosexual biological parents. Everything else is borderline child abuse.

Given that the children of two heterosexual married biological parents are invariably better off in every possible way we can measure, it is not such a bad idea. If it encourages some parents to marry it may well save us money later through reduce prison bills, costs of truant officers, vandalism, mental illness and so on.

What we’re measuring is people who choose to commit through marriage and this strongly correlates with people who are responsible. Getting more people to marry doesn’t change their behaviour.

If you want to stop fecklessness, it’s the incentives related to work and breeding that you need to change.

The Stigler – “What we’re measuring is people who choose to commit through marriage and this strongly correlates with people who are responsible. Getting more people to marry doesn’t change their behaviour.”

People are not born with an inbuilt level of responsibility. It is something that is learned and is situational. I am not sure that the mere presence of a marriage certificate will work wonders, but it will clarify thinking. She will think if this is a man she wants to have a child with. He will think if he is ready to be a parent. They will signal to the world their intent.

The 50s were a time when many young men were forced to step up to the plate and become Fathers. They did fine by and large. Why do you think their grandchildren cannot?

“If you want to stop fecklessness, it’s the incentives related to work and breeding that you need to change.”

I agree with that too. But it is impossible to deny the social and cultural changes that have taken place since Elvis was serving in Germany. We can change back. The way to start is to shame unmarried mothers. By pointing out the obvious truth – their selfishness is hurting their children.

JuliaM. We do still do shame. We shame men who pay for sex. Most men who cannot provide feel deeply ashamed (despite some bravado). We shame men publicly when they are innocent of accused rape. Women shame men when they make here feel ‘weird’.
What we do not do anymore is shame women. That might have been your point.

People are not born with an inbuilt level of responsibility. It is something that is learned and is situational. I am not sure that the mere presence of a marriage certificate will work wonders, but it will clarify thinking. She will think if this is a man she wants to have a child with. He will think if he is ready to be a parent. They will signal to the world their intent.

I think you’re projecting your own views on how you see marriage, that you take it seriously. The marriage certificate is as much of a commitment by someone as they see it.

My sister-in-law’s first husband, well, I gently tried to lead her towards dumping him before marriage when she thought he’d been screwing someone else. He never seemed like good marrying material. She got it wrong, he was a rat. He didn’t treat it with seriousness.

A wedding certificate, a ring, are ultimately, just a piece of paper and a bit of metal. It is us that gives them their meaning. But if we don’t believe in them, they are just a piece of paper and a bit of metal.

The 50s were a time when many young men were forced to step up to the plate and become Fathers. They did fine by and large. Why do you think their grandchildren cannot?

What’s the incentives for a woman to make sure that she’s got a man with a paycheque and a family that is going to make sure that he is honourable before he gets to bump uglies? What was it like in the 1950s? Did they get a flat, new clothes, reasonable food, or were they expected to live with their parents?

We can change back. The way to start is to shame unmarried mothers. By pointing out the obvious truth – their selfishness is hurting their children.

But “shaming” was about failure. A woman who had a child with a man who disappeared was a failure in life. Kid, no-one to support her. The kid wasn’t going to go far with that sort of start. If you’re a married couple on a low-income today in the UK, you aren’t really much better off than a single mother who treats her vagina like a clown car. That couple will get assessed for a council tax and get what the single mother gets, because it’s based on need, related to children, rather than what they bring. What he brings in will be taxed, lose a load of it in benefit cuts, so left with hardly anything (which is why some single fathers don’t bother because at least they get more time with their kids).

Paul. Why do you have so much trouble with this? Everybody’s problems are not automatically everybody else’s problems. Other people were funding the blokes married tax allowance before she handed in her food pail. That’s the deal. Why do they have to fund that particular allowance now she’s croaked? If you extend this, no-one could be expected to experience life’s consequences themselves. You”ll be expecting the State to provide him with a replacement squeeze next. Maybe her demise might warrant other assistance. Maybe it wouldn’t. That’s an entirely different matter.

SMFS, sorry I don’t agree with you. Whatever the sexuality if there’s love what does it matter? The idea of tax transfer for married couples doesn’t involve children – I’ll use it and have no kids.
Marriage certificate and ring or rings don’t matter, making a committment in front of others is more relevant. Some of us do not make committments lightly or get rid without a fight.

I think you’re getting the chain of causation all wrong. So, at best, this policy is putting a bit of extra cash in the hands of people who are statistically more likely to make choices which make better children.. so it’s a bonus for something they were going to do anyway. It won’t change any behaviour.

And it’s interesting that you explicitly mention hetrosexuals. Teh Gays bringing up children is a relatively new thing, and still pretty rare. Is there anything statistically significant to suggest that their kids do worse than those of hetrosexual couples? I’d expect that the average gay couple with kids is in a better socio-economic place than the average hetrosexual couple with kids.. is there any evidence that such couples are less stable (as oppose to the wider gay population, which certainly is). I think we’re a long way from having an answer.

On the policy.. I’m with Alex. Single folk are already taxed more than couples.. and we have to deal with everything being more expensive. That 25% council tax discount is nice.. but hardly much. The £200 bung will go directly towards making any house I want to buy slightly more expensive. It’s as cynical, desperate and short-sighted as anything that Gordon Brown came up with.

Is there anything statistically significant to suggest that their kids do worse than those of hetrosexual couples?

There’s some decent research in this area, including some longitudinal studies. The only negative effect is a slightly increased rate of bullying at school by kids who are parroting their parents homophobia. Other than that, they do just the same as parents of straight kids.

@Matthew
Don’t want to rain on anyone’s Gay Pride Parade here but isn’t that exactly what you’d expect that solidly PC body of professionals, the education establishment? Good As You but with a slight bit of agro from the knuckledraggers, which they’ve stepped on hard. Would you seriously think the studies would say anything else?

Well fair enough bloke, I guess we can’t have any research at all so we’ll just go with our prejudices instead.

The studies aren’t done by the education establishment, they’re done by university researchers.

Tim adds: I have to admit that I’m looking forward to this immensely. Indeed, I hope I live long enough to see it out. Because it really is only the last ten years that has led to any appreciable level of surrogacy (for gay male couples) or sperm donation (for the distaff side).

And soon we’re going to see. For the first time. Kids raised by gay parents are what? We’ll know the genetic contributions, we’ll know the environment. It’s going to be absolutely fascinating.

I, for one, am looking forward to the Elton John/David Furnish kids having that awkward 15 year old conversation. Umm, Dad, umm, I’m straight? Or maybe not: which is why the last decade or so is going to be such a fabulous experiment to study.

Yah, OK, so I shouldn’t take peoples’ live as something to study. But it really is going to be fascinating.

Sorry, one more point. Those of Teh Gayers who are having kids now (and more so in the past) are those with higher incomes or more than general hetero commitment to having kids. There ain’t no “mistakes” here. It’s a planned operation. So those kids should be doing better. On the basis that those with higher incomes and or those who deliberately plan to have kids have kids who do better.

The finding that the kids of Teh Gayers do the same as all the other kids is actually a failure.

When we’re all finished, this is £200 in the pocket of the group that overall has the biggest outgoings. And yes, if you want the anecdote, I married late and had kids later; I do know the finances.
If anybody’s experience leads them to think that £200 isn’t much, well great for you. No really, I’m pleased for you. But you’ll be standing next to Richard Murphy , who thinks £200 isn’t worth filling in a tax return for (I wonder what the woman who keeps him thinks about that, or the union- leader/walking cashpoint machine who’s members are working hard to keep the middle class scrounging bastard in his Norfolk lifestyle).
No, most of the recipients of this will be grateful for it, some not much; some actually better off.

P.S. Tim: I think the next decade will be even more fascinating to see just how mangled and botched an analysis our academics from the University of Central Lancashire or the like can carry out. We might even get Freakonomics II published on the back of it: I can’t wait.

” But by your logic, we can’t trust any research whatsoever..”
It’s a good principal, when being told something to start by asking “Why am I being told this?” and work from there.
It was ignoring this principal, resulted in the dark ages.

Martin Davies – “Whatever the sexuality if there’s love what does it matter?”

Because love comes and goes. Marriage is, or used to be, forever. People stuck it out. The converse of “marriage is all about luuuvv” is that when the husband starts to think his secretary is looking hot, he may well find he does not love his wife as much as he used to. He will still find himself married.

I am not sure how it works, but it does work. Children do much better in married couples. No matter how much they love each other. Marriage is more than a piece of paper. And it is a mark of how dumbed down the concept of marriage has become that so many people say so.

“Marriage certificate and ring or rings don’t matter, making a committment in front of others is more relevant. Some of us do not make committments lightly or get rid without a fight.”

All the evidence says otherwise. Marriage matters. Having children without it is borderline child abuse.

Except people’s characters are not writ in stone. They respond to the environment around them. If you keep saying that marriage is meaningless, they will come to think that marriage is meaningless. And we do give free passes to men who walk out of their marriages. Not praise like we do to women who do, but not condemnation either.

“It won’t change any behaviour.”

I agree because it is too small. But the principle is not bad.

“And it’s interesting that you explicitly mention hetrosexuals. Teh Gays bringing up children is a relatively new thing, and still pretty rare. Is there anything statistically significant to suggest that their kids do worse than those of hetrosexual couples?”

Yes there is. Mark Regnerus showed that the children of Gay couples do worse. The Gay lobby responded as you would expect and demanded that he be fired. So his work passed not only peer review, but also his University holding an inquiry into his findings. He passed them going over all his e-mail and hard drives.

Given the PC-ridden Gay-dominated nature of most universities, you can understand why so few people are willing to cross the Gay lobby. Which makes findings like this all the more strong.

“I’d expect that the average gay couple with kids is in a better socio-economic place than the average hetrosexual couple with kids.. is there any evidence that such couples are less stable (as oppose to the wider gay population, which certainly is). I think we’re a long way from having an answer.”

I agree that children raising in Gay couples should be better off. There seems to be no evidence that they are. And no, Gay (male) couples do not appear more stable in the sense of the core concept of marriage – fidelity. Very few report no cheating. Divorce is higher in lesbian couples though.

“It’s as cynical, desperate and short-sighted as anything that Gordon Brown came up with.”

I agree with that.

“Tim adds: I have to admit that I’m looking forward to this immensely. Indeed, I hope I live long enough to see it out. Because it really is only the last ten years that has led to any appreciable level of surrogacy (for gay male couples) or sperm donation (for the distaff side).”

Can I just point out how this sounds? We are experimenting with children. We have been engaged in a vast ideologically driven experiment, with children, for the past 40 or so years. The results, as far as heterosexual couples go, has been appalling. See Baby P. Children are not only suffering, they are actually dying. Repeating the experiment with Gay couples seems to me to pile lunacy on top of utter irresponsibility, but let’s remember what is at stake here – children are dying. We wouldn’t be allowed to do this in a drug trial, or in a psychological experiment, but we can do it in the name of that never-quite-achieved equality. It is insanity. Remember what the consequences are.

To quote Instapundit, what can’t go on forever won’t. We will change back. It just depends if we want to do it ourselves or we will import people like Abu Hamza to do it for us. So far we seem determined on the latter.

“And if you think shame can be a factor, you’ve not been reading the news. No-one does shame any more.”

Depends on the shame. Women certainly try still. Just try to be a boy in a British school and admit a fondness for guns. Or for breasts.

@Tim in his final paragraph.
It’s that makes me suspicious of studies showing what studies would be preferred to show.
Take the bullying incidence. A lot of those kids will be going to school in the UK’s delightful…er…culturally enriched cities. And they can’t all be going to private schools. I can just imagine.what a couple of hulking blacks are going to make of a kid who’s parents are batty boys. . And that bit of news’ll be round the school before the bell’s stopped ringing. For “a slightly increased rate of bullying at school by kids parroting their parents homophobia”. read “making life a misery by kids conforming to mainstream Afro-Caribbean & African culture.”(Fuck knows what the Muslims will do) I know the hell the ex’s lad went through & the only thing he had going against him was being white & a new kid. So either the teachers are showing a lot more willingness & more importantly, ability to act in these particular children’s cases. (Difficult to see how. I had some sympathy for them). Or the research input is misleading.

The Stigler – “I think you’re projecting your own views on how you see marriage, that you take it seriously. The marriage certificate is as much of a commitment by someone as they see it.”

They are not my views. They are views that I have come to partly because I am older but also because the force of the evidence says it is true. We have debased the idea of a marriage, but it is still there in a way that shacking up is not.

“A wedding certificate, a ring, are ultimately, just a piece of paper and a bit of metal. It is us that gives them their meaning. But if we don’t believe in them, they are just a piece of paper and a bit of metal.”

That is true, but it takes a lot more work to ignore that ceremony than it does just to drift in or out of living with someone. After all, a marriage requires a conscious decision. It needs preparation and planning. It costs. It is a statement to the world. Getting out is mildly harder too. Most people just drift into living together. They never make the decision. Hanging may concentrate a man’s mind, but so does marriage.

“What’s the incentives for a woman to make sure that she’s got a man with a paycheque and a family that is going to make sure that he is honourable before he gets to bump uglies? What was it like in the 1950s? Did they get a flat, new clothes, reasonable food, or were they expected to live with their parents?”

Indeed. We need to shift the incentives. Or at least we need to stop paying mothers to produce Baby P.

“But “shaming” was about failure. A woman who had a child with a man who disappeared was a failure in life. Kid, no-one to support her. The kid wasn’t going to go far with that sort of start.”

None of that has changed. We have just made that failure more comfortable. She is a failure in life – the one thing that is still true about successful people is that they strongly tend to be married and the products of intact homes. Unlike, say, guests of Her Majesty.

“If you’re a married couple on a low-income today in the UK, you aren’t really much better off than a single mother who treats her vagina like a clown car.”

Which is criminal. But it doesn’t change the fact that such parents are vastly better for their children than single mothers.

Matthew L – “Nobody’s saying that. But by your logic, we can’t trust any research whatsoever so we should go back to the dark ages.”

When powerful lobbies resort to Lysenkoism to suppress research they do not like, we are already half way into the Dark Ages. You can see how reliable this Gay propaganda is by the fact that they need to repress anyone who says otherwise.

@’SMFS
Re your post regarding marriage;
I still stick by what I said about the gay marriage issue a while ago. Marriage isn’t & never was solely about the couple themselves. If it was, you wouldn’t need marriage. It is also the marriage of two families. It’s why we talk about “in laws” Bride & groom each gain a new set of parents & assorted brothers & sisters. Whole raft of uncles, aunts, nephews, cousins. The words themselves define a complex relationship between different families. Anyone reading this who’s married & not plugged into some degree of extended family? And those families are often what helps keep a marriage together. Walking out on one person is a lot different from walking out of a whole network of relationships.
Now the metrosexual middle classes may have cleaved to the idea of single sex marriage but there’s a lot of other people who are uncomfortable with it.or just deny it can exist. There’s a whole lot of people don’t much care for homosexuality either. Difficult to know because even expressing an opinion can be a criminal offense & I expect this comment will draw flack from the usual suspects. Said a couple days ago “Bigotry – the self righteousness felt when not sharing another’s dislike.”
So whether children will do equally well in different forms of marriage or the absence of marriage is not simply about the couple themselves. The children can also benefit from the extended family. The benefit of the children is why we had marriage in the first place. And therefore how the families perceive the couple is also important. It can be a lot more complex than just two people.

As usual with any factual claim made by SMFS, this is untrue. Regnerus compared “children of parents who have had same-sex relationships and those with married parents”. He did not look at children with parents in stable same-sex relationships. His study suggests that children whose parents stay together typically do better than children whose parents split up.

PaulB – “As usual with any factual claim made by SMFS, this is untrue. Regnerus compared “children of parents who have had same-sex relationships and those with married parents”. He did not look at children with parents in stable same-sex relationships. His study suggests that children whose parents stay together typically do better than children whose parents split up.”

As usual PaulB is displaying his usual butthurt. As usual PaulB does not find a single unfactual claim in anything I have said, but as usual he claims it anyway.

Naturally when Regnerus released his report the Gay lobby tried to get him fired. They went over his work and found any number of little objections. There are always a lot of things people could have looked it if they had an infinite amount of time and funding. But as many other sociologists have pointed out, nothing Regnerus did was in any way unusual for sociology or would make his paper unpublishable.

And now comes PaulB’s usual dishonesty. He says the study suggests that it is about divorce. As it happens I might well agree it probably is. To some extent. But that is not what Regnerus’ study *says*. The study says that it found robust evidence for worse outcomes in Gay families. It is what PaulB wishes to believe to explain away Regnerus’ findings. Which is a very different kettle of fish.

Not to mention, of course, in his large representative sample of families, he couldn’t find many stable Gay households. Which I think kind if proves his point.

By their fruits you shall know them. The fact that the response to this article has been a witchhunt and the usual Leftist McCarthyism, proves that it is probably true. If they could have argued on the facts, they would have argued on the facts.

There’s a whole lot of people don’t much care for homosexuality either.

Interviewer: How do people in your country typically see lesbians?

Man on the street: In high def.

But seriously, I have difficulty being sympathetic for people who don’t care for homosexuality. If you don’t like doing it, don’t do it, but the relationships other people have are nobody’s business but their own.

As for SMFS and his ridiculous conspiracy theories about the Gay Police, reality is contradicting them more each day.

MatthewL
” but the relationships other people have are nobody’s business but their own.”
As I’ve tried to explain above, when people have children, when people marry, they make it other people’s business. How many people set up home, drop a couple of sprogs in total isolation? Have no contact, make no demands on their families. And those people have opinions of their own. Grandparents feel affinity with their grandchildren. Are you suggesting they’re ignored?

Where do we get this idea that Teh Gayers are richer, more eloquent, and so on, than the rest of us thus should produce better-adjusted sprogs? Could it be because teh only gayers you see in the meejah are like something out of “grim up north London”? And that there must be fewer gayers in teh underclass because teh underclass is uneducated, barbarian, bigoted and anti-gay?

There are actually plenty of gayers out there in the lower reaches of society, some of them even raising sprogs.

@bis, indeed I am not plugged into a large extended family, how that is a consequence of (1) our emigration (2) mines changing continent every generation for the last 3 generations, (3) ‘ers being all single/zero kidders, (4) mine others all being gayers.

bis: I remember that there’s a regular commenter here who is married to a Columbian woman. There are people in this world who think that miscegenation like that is deplorable, and they’re very uncomfortable with such unions. If that commenter’s extended family included such people, do you think he would have appreciated being told not to ignore them?